Aprisma Management Technologies Inc. next month will try to shake up the service-level management arena with enhanced versions of its Spectrum suite of management applications.
The Durham, N.H., spinoff of the former Cabletron Systems Inc. will bundle enhancements, new packaging, new pricing and a Service Level Intelligence initiative designed to set Aprisma apart from service-level management competitors.
Aprismas initiative and Spectrums strengths in correlation line it up perfectly with todays definition of service-level management, said Paul Bugala, senior analyst at International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass.
“People are looking to take performance data and align it with the services customers buy. [Aprisma has] a truckload of patents with their correlation capabilities, and they are able to create traps based on the services outlined in the SLA [service-level agreement],” Bugala said.
The markets latest definition of service-level management puts Aprisma at an advantage over competitors such as MicroMuse Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.
Aprisma built on that in its latest enhancements with a new alarm impact analysis feature that allows alarms to be linked to a specific service or customer. Aprisma also created versions of Spectrum tailored for either enterprises or service providers. The core technology for both versions was enhanced to improve performance—by as much as 100 percent for existing customers—and both versions include a new rules-based correlation engine to supplement Spectrums model-based correlation engine. The option allows network engineers to better perform predictive analysis.
Even without the enhancements, Spectrums robust polling engine for fault management provides a solid foundation for SLA management, said Spectrum user Leona LaChance, director of shared services technology and operations at Telus Corp. in Calgary, Alberta. Telus is Canadas second-largest telecommunications company.
“A service provider lives and dies by fault management. We can do 24-by-7 support without sitting in front of a screen [using Spectrums automated trouble tickets]. That trust has to be there when youre doing SLA management,” LaChance said.
The new Spectrum Integrity for enterprises will be available in January starting at $75,000. Aprisma changed its a la carte pricing so that the base price includes all fault management modules, a discovery engine, root cause analysis and support for 850 devices.
Spectrum Infinity for service providers, also due in January, differs from Integrity in that it can be integrated with other OSS (operation support system) applications for billing, directory services and provisioning. Specifically, it can integrate with OSS applications from Cplane Inc. and Orchestream Ltd.